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Black Friday 2022: how to prepare your e-commerce companies

Marc
Published on Sep 15, 2022

During the last couple of years, online shoppers’ behavior has made a massive shift due to the pandemic. E-commerce companies have been accelerated, and a growing amount of people prefer online shopping to visit brick and mortar stores. Taking this into consideration businesses need to adjust to this new era.

Below you can find 10 actionable steps that will help you and your team prepare for Black Friday 2022.

1. Plan early & set your targets 

The sooner you start planning for Black Friday the better prepared your team will be. Some questions that will assist you in this process are: what kind of Black Friday promotions would we like to run? On what dates? What will be the duration of the promotional period? What is the advertising budget we are willing to spend? Will we offer free delivery on occasion?

On the operational side: can our team handle all the questions about our products or services that our customers might have? Do we have enough time to be fully prepared? Is our hosting provider able to cope with the anticipated traffic?

Use your previous Black Friday stats as a baseline and set clear targets. Having measurable targets in place is the first step to success. 

2. Optimize your website 

From a technical standpoint, make sure that your website loads fast and make improvements to your website navigation if needed. Another important factor is the mobile version of your website. Make sure that it is optimized, as a vast majority of shoppers use their mobile phones to research deals and even complete a purchase. Another important factor for increasing your conversion rate is your product pages. Make sure that you give all the information that someone needs to buy an item and that also high-quality product photos are used.

3. Build suspense around your upcoming deals

Start teasing your Black Friday deals to your customers as early as possible, with a big focus on Black Friday week. Use all the channels available, such as social media, web banners, and email marketing. You should allocate a significant amount of budget to paid advertisements on Facebook and Google as well.

Creating a promotional content calendar with all the assets and content you want to share will assist you in this process.

4. Create a landing page and/or adjust your website’s look and feel

To be ahead of the game, you can build a dedicated landing page for your Black Friday deals. That’s where your customers will land following a promotional campaign or a social media link and will also be a place where all your deals can be found together. 

You can also apply a skin to your homepage and any other website areas of your choice (maybe to a popular page) or a promo banner that will be shown to all your website visitors.

5. Use email marketing

Email is a staple of Black Friday. The more segmented and targeted email campaigns you create, the higher revenue per recipient you can generate. Some examples of segmentation include high-value shoppers, recent openers, gift buyers, email ignorers, etc. Each segment needs to be handled with a different strategy. For example, email ignorers might receive an offer for free shipping,”high-value” shoppers a bigger discount, gift buyers a gift bundle, and so on.

6. Use Social Commerce

Social commerce is getting traction and is predicted to grow to $1.6 trillion in the next three years. You can use Social Media to directly sell your products and services to customers and it can serve as a supplementary channel for your e-commerce business.

7. Prepare a shipping and returns plan

As a first step, use the past year’s data to have a rough estimation of past demand and stock up inventory and packaging materials accordingly. Make sure that all your shipping partners can provide reliable and fast shipping according to your agreement.

Make your customers aware that they need to purchase by a specific date to receive their package by the time they need it. Also, have a clear and concise returns policy in place.

8. Audit the checkout experience  

Test your checkout process and make sure that it is slick. Online shoppers, especially on Black Friday, want to order an item as fast as possible, so the whole process needs to be flawless. Also, offer several payment methods. The more methods the better, as the easier you make it for customers to pay you the more revenue you will be generating.

9. Recover abandoned carts

On many occasions, customers abandon their shopping carts. This happens due to various reasons. For example, they may want to continue browsing in case they find a better deal, they don’t like the shipping costs, or for any other reason. You can tackle this issue by setting up retargeting ads and cart abandonment emails. 

With retargeting ads, you can present customers with the exact items they have abandoned and assist them to follow through with the purchase.

Cart abandonment emails are also a great tool to improve the cart abandonment rate. Make sure that you use a very strong subject line and that you also offer something extra to your customers like free shipping or a coupon code, if your business can afford it. In any case, the window to get your customers back is very limited so the whole abandonment recovery process should be very well thought out.

10. Monitor your results and adjust your strategy

A simple and effective way to monitor your e-commerce companies performance is to create a self-updating reporting dashboard – if you don’t have one already in place. 

You can use Google Data Studio for that purpose. Check out this comprehensive dashboard from Supermetrics as it is a great example of e-commerce monitoring.

Make sure that you monitor the performance of all your activities daily during the promotional period and quickly adjust your budget allocation to the most effective channels and activities. 

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